Jerry Rubin Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Early life and education
Jerry Rubin was born in 1938 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in a Jewish family that prized education and public engagement. He attended the University of Cincinnati and spent time studying abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before returning to the United States. The mix of Midwestern roots and exposure to global politics helped shape a worldview that would later fuse moral urgency with theatrical provocation. By the mid-1960s he had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that was becoming synonymous with protest culture and the experimentation of the New Left.

Entering the movement
Rubin emerged quickly as a visible organizer in Berkeley. He helped build coalitions against the Vietnam War and became a pivotal figure in mass teach-ins and demonstrations. With other activists, he worked through groups such as the Vietnam Day Committee to turn campuses and city streets into forums for dissent. The tone of the work blended serious political education with an instinct for public spectacle that Rubin would refine in the years ahead. In this period he intersected with figures like Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis from Students for a Democratic Society, and with community organizers in the East Bay who were linking antiwar politics to broader questions of social justice.

The Yippies and political theater
In 1967, 1968 Rubin joined forces with Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Anita Hoffman, Nancy Kurshan, Stew Albert, and others to launch the Youth International Party, the Yippies. The coalition drew upon poets and provocateurs such as Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg, and it treated politics as a stage on which stunts could puncture the authority of institutions. Rubin became one of the movement's boldest impresarios. A famous early gesture came in New York, when activists tossed dollar bills from a visitors' gallery onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, a lampoon of greed as traders scrambled for the cash. Rubin also helped publicize the idea of "levitating" the Pentagon during a massive antiwar mobilization, a sardonic fusion of ritual and rebellion that brought counterculture charisma into mainstream headlines.

1968 Chicago and confrontation with the state
The Yippies' most consequential gambit was their "Festival of Life" outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Paul Krassner used satire and music to draw attention to the party establishment's handling of the war. One notorious Yippie act was the nomination of a pig, Pigasus, for president, a jab at political theater that mirrored Rubin's own sensibility. The week devolved into confrontations as Mayor Richard J. Daley's police force clashed with protesters; the spectacle of tear gas and billy clubs broadcast a sense of generation-wide rupture.

In the aftermath, federal prosecutors charged Rubin and his peers with conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot. Initially arraigned as part of the "Chicago Eight", the group included Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. When Bobby Seale's case was severed, the remaining defendants became the "Chicago Seven". The proceedings placed Rubin face to face with Judge Julius Hoffman, whose impatience and stern rulings set the trial's combative tone. Defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass argued that the courtroom had become a stage for criminalizing dissent. Rubin and Hoffman used a mix of humor, defiance, and sharp commentary to highlight what they viewed as political repression. Several defendants, including Rubin, were convicted on some counts and sentenced for contempt, but the convictions were later overturned on appeal, a reversal that underscored concerns about judicial conduct and prosecutorial overreach.

Campaigns, writing, and a public persona
Rubin was more than a provocateur; he was a candidate and author who sought to turn cultural insurgency into durable politics. He ran for mayor of Berkeley in the late 1960s and drew a significant protest vote, a symbolic campaign that pressed issues like war, housing, and youth power into municipal debate. He captured the mood and arguments of the era in Do It!: Scenarios of the Revolution, published in 1970, a kinetic book that mixed manifestos, tactics, and memoir. He also wrote Growing (Up) at Thirty-Seven in the mid-1970s, reflecting on the costs and complexities of life after the barricades, and on how adulthood tested the ideals of the 1960s.

Rubin's orbit extended into popular culture. He moved through the same circuits as musicians and artists who were shaping the public face of dissent. He appeared alongside John Lennon and Yoko Ono as they used celebrity to amplify antiwar messages, and he debated psychedelic evangelists such as Timothy Leary about the role of consciousness change versus direct political action. These alliances and arguments made Rubin a fixture on college campuses and television talk shows, where he parried critics and insisted that protest had to be disruptive if it was to be seen and heard.

Reinvention in the 1970s and 1980s
By the mid-to-late 1970s, Rubin's path began to diverge from that of friends who remained in the trenches of protest. He signaled a turn toward personal growth and pragmatism, writing about adulthood, family, and work. In the 1980s he startled admirers and critics alike by embracing the language of entrepreneurship and "networking", becoming a visible figure in business circles and arguing that change could also be driven by markets and technology. He cultivated a persona that explicitly contrasted with his old comrade Abbie Hoffman; together they toured campuses in spirited "Yippie versus Yuppie" debates, sparring over whether the energies of the 1960s should be harnessed inside or outside traditional economic life. The exchanges, remembered by students and journalists, served as a public reckoning with the movement's legacy, with Rubin defending his evolution while acknowledging the ruptures it caused among veterans of the New Left.

Last years
Rubin remained a skilled promoter of ideas into the early 1990s, organizing events that fused socializing, career building, and advocacy, and continuing to write and lecture about how dissidents might navigate an era dominated by media and markets. His relationships with fellow activists endured in complex ways. Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, and Stew Albert critiqued his business turn even as they recognized his talent for drawing attention to causes; lawyers like William Kunstler remained touchstones in Rubin's narratives about the trial that had defined his youth. He stayed connected to a generation of artists and organizers who had helped him challenge the boundaries between protest and performance.

Death and legacy
In 1994 Rubin died from injuries after being struck by a car in Los Angeles. News of his death prompted an outpouring of assessments that tracked the arc from insurgent to entrepreneur. Admirers recalled the fearlessness with which he and Abbie Hoffman had exposed the pretensions of power during the Chicago Seven trial before Judge Julius Hoffman. Observers also noted how his reinvention sparked debates about the routes available to children of the 1960s as the country moved into a period of deregulation and corporate expansion.

Jerry Rubin's legacy endures in the grammar of modern protest: culture jamming, theatrical disruptions, and media-savvy spectacles that aim to bend the news cycle. He stands as a paradoxical emblem of his time, at once an architect of audacious street politics and a figure who argued, later, that influence could be won by mastering the tools of business. The people around him shaped that story: Abbie Hoffman as a foil and friend; Paul Krassner as chronicler and co-conspirator; poets like Allen Ginsberg and satirists like Ed Sanders as collaborators; legal guardians like William Kunstler; and co-defendants Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale as comrades in a trial that became a national referendum on dissent. Through them, and through his own restless shifts, Rubin helped define an era in which politics spilled into everyday life and public space became a stage.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Jerry, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Deep - Freedom - Change - Work.

Other people realated to Jerry: John Lennon (Musician), Phil Ochs (Musician), Todd Gitlin (Sociologist)